Pins & Needles

My first quilt project using an actual pattern was a gift for my mother. My mom’s oldest sister is a prolific and very talented quilter. Sadly she lives halfway across the country so I basically never see her, I’m not particularly close to her, and I’ve never been able to learn anything from her craft-wise. C’est la vie. But because of her I do know my mom is pretty down with quilty decor, so I decided to make her a cute little mini. This was tricky because I wanted it to be a surprise and I was living with her at the time. Suffice it to say, this little guy did not get finished when I had hoped.

The pattern is Heart Spin Mini Quilt by Hope Nelson. It’s a cute little pattern that finishes at about 14″ square and uses a mini charm pack. Ironically, because nowadays I’m constantly looking for mini charm patterns, I used a charm pack. Go figure. The fabric is Zoey by Eleanor Burns for Benartex.

This was my first time doing anything more complicated than some HSTs, but overall it wasn’t bad. The hearts in the center went together very smoothly. I definitely had to pick apart and adjust the borders a few times to get them to match up correctly though. Since this was going to be a wall hanging I wanted to get a little fancier with the quilting, so I stitched in the ditch around the hearts and then gave it some little pinstripes in the white open area. I was still intimidated by binding, so this is also self-bound with the backing fabric, this time by hand. I’m not super thrilled with the binding, I accidentally trimmed the backing a bit smaller than I meant to so folding the raw edge under was finicky. Chalk it up to a learning experience. This now hangs in my parents’ hallway.

Update: 12/15/2020
Now that I actually know how to attach binding, the hack job I did on this mini was offending me so I had my sister snag it back for me. I didn’t have the same fabric as I used for the original binding, but I had a different green dot that worked. While I had it I also added a little tag to the back.

My second project was a 2nd year anniversary gift for my cousin and her husband – the cotton anniversary, y’know. They’ve got nice little reproductions of the Declaration of Independence and a couple other important US documents hanging up, so I thought a little patchwork Betsy Ross flag might be a nice addition.

Again I didn’t use a pattern, just decided about how big I wanted it to be and figured out how big my blocks should be based on that. In this case I obviously knew how many rows it would have to be, so it was just figuring out block size and then how many blocks wide it should be.

I chose 4 prints in each color so I could give it a pleasantly random look.

Laid them all out so each print was spread out. I didn’t want clumping.

Sewed the squares into rows and then sewed the rows together.

This mini doesn’t have a binding. Since it’s supposed to be a flag I didn’t want it to have a border like that. I finished it using the envelope method, which I had used before when making bodices. Put it right sides together with the backing, sew most of the way around, then flip it right side out through the bit that isn’t sewn. Ladder stitch the last bit shut, then press everything neatly. It was quilted with just basic horizontal lines going through the stripes (mostly just to keep it flat, I was more interested in the patchwork element) and then I sewed star buttons on to the canton.